In June of this year, I sent out a story to be considered for Best Lesbian Erotica 2014, a popular anthology put out by Cleis Press. The largest independent queer publisher in the U.S., Cleis has established itself as the de facto clearinghouse for lesbian erotica. . . .
The story I submitted, called “Cottonmouth” . . . is about two teenage cousins who go for a walk in the Mississippi woods to escape the afternoon heat and end up face-to-face with the mystery of sexuality and nature and the myths created about the two. The story was accepted by the guest editor, Sarah Schulman. While Sarah loved it, she had a tussle with the publishers about whether or not the story’s focus was “bestiality.” Sarah’s position was, “So what?” . . .
Then August came, and I received another email from Sarah saying that Cleis wanted to remove “Cottonmouth” from the collection because the characters were underage, and claiming that Cleis faced “legal vulnerability.” Sarah, whose novel The Child, about a sexual relationship between a 15-year-old boy and a 40-year-old man, faced no legal consequences, immediately recognized this as censorship and wrote, “I cannot permit this and will go to the wall.” . . .
Now I see that the discomfort generated by my story marks a shift in what Cleis Press is targeting as their main audience. The “queer” label associated with the publisher is no longer so much about making a space for outsiders to be heard as it is about niche marketing. This is where the fear comes in. Ultimately, the anxiety around the homosexual as pedophile and the uncomfortable linkage of homosexuality with bestiality still looms large in a certain sector of the American public’s imagination.

Translation: “Hey, it’s just a harmless story about two teenage cousins who have sex with a snake, what’s the big deal? And I mean, c’mon, the guest editor wrote a novel about pederasty, so obviously you didn’t have a problem with that, right?”

But remember, there’s no such thing as a “gay agenda.” Anybody who says there is such an agenda is a paranoid homophobic bigot.

What I meant was, we have left it behind in the sense that we (what’s left of western civilization) are heading toward an even worse destination. Call it whatever you want: the center cannot hold, a house divided against itself cannot stand, societal suicide…but we’re disintegrating. On the whole, as a society we are already morally no better than the men of Sodom. Only real difference is exactly what Bork wrote: modern people are subsisting (to the degree that they even bother) on the unreplenished moral fumes of prior devout generations, and those fumes won’t last long. The residual skin of self-righteousness, which is about all that now restrains many people from utter lawlessness, is deliberately abraded away a little more each day. Collapse is inevitable.

RT @rsmccain: “Hey, it’s just a harmless story about two teenage cousins who have sex with a snake …” http://t.co/HzKj3dmihI

Ivory December 15th, 2013 @ 12:41 pm

Ding, ding, ding! Once again these sickos reach new depths of depravity. Literally thousands of these like minded perverts living amongst us and pushing every way they can to normalize their wickedness. God help us!

[…] Why Are Huffington Post’s ‘Gay Voices’ Columnists Fixated on Underage Sex? A week ago, a Huffington Post columnist argued that it was homophobic to criticize gay men who use Internet sex sites to meet teenage partners. You might shrug that off as an anomaly, if you didn’t realize that in May, Huffington Post was enthusiastically aboard the “Free Kate” bandwagon to legalize sex with 14-year-olds in Florida. […]